


The Bastille Opera Blues Job

by Radiolaria



Category: Leverage
Genre: Banter, Family, Fluff, Gen, Magic, Mind Manipulation, Minor Sophie Devereaux/Nathan Ford, Nonsense, Past Sophie/Tara, Some Plot, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 17:25:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13081674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: “I think we can go bigger”, Hardison detached each word from each other.Nate’s eyebrows flew up, not exactly in surprise. He looked sideways at Sophie who was smirking at Hardison.“Okay. Generally, when I say that, Sophie pummels me to the ground and she encourages you. Unbelievable.”In which Hardison leads the show and more or less adopts a theatre troupe.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Melime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/gifts).



> For Melime, I hope this makes you smile.

Tara emphatically dropped down on the bed, sending a flock of indigo feathers flying in the air. The furniture was covered in large ostrich and paradise bird’s feathers, some still unprocessed, some dyed in extravagant colours. They created a nice contrast to the warm tones of the room, the washed oranges and deep red of the broken tiles that the innkeeper sold them as romantic. If she had to conclude a brilliant and exciting heist, this was as good a closing shot as she could get.

Well. Almost.

She smiled to herself.

Sophie was still wearing the bright yellow protection suit.

“Are you sure you disposed of the bugs entirely?” Sophie asked, as she unfolded from behind the bed, arms full of the tallest pink ostrich attire Tara had ever seen. She arranged them on the blanket and climbed on the mattress, carefully avoiding the feathers.  

“We certainly wouldn’t be in a bed if I had any doubt about their fate.” Tara answered. “Have you finished reviewing our loot?”

Sophie huffed and repositioned her knees under her to sit closer to the impressive stack. The protection suit was an impediment in the process and, to Tara’s relief, Sophie resolved to unzip and peel off the unbecoming layer.

“You talk about it as if it’s baubles”, she chided Tara. “I assure you the Maison Février will pay us a fortune for this.”

“I’d rather they stick them to you and let you parade on the Moulin Rouge stage.”

Tara picked the shortest feather and brushed Sophie’s now naked arm.

“That is really poor. I hope you are ashamed of yourself.”

_Bingo._

“Am not. You look better in the exterminator uniform anyway.”

Sophie gave her a mortified look and administered a small slap to her thigh.

“Pest.”

“I’ll bite you for that.”

Tara leaned in to place a kiss at the crook of Sophie’s smile.

“This is why I can never work with you”, Sophie sighed into her cheek.

“Being followed around by Serbo-croatian mob girl gangs?” Tara shuffled on her ass closer to Sophie. “I already apologized about that and it won’t happen again. Although they did invite us for a drink.”

“Not them. The flirting.”

Tara smirked and pressed herself against Sophie, whose hands were busy removing the chips of wood caught in the feathers.

“And the kissing”, Sophie breathed, clearly distracted.

Tara simply bit her lower lip and her arms snaked around Sophie’s torso, pushing down the suit in which Sophie was still marinating.

_Damn Brit, so sensitive to the cold._

“We’ll still be here tomorrow if we can’t condition them properly before leaving. Trust me, you don’t want to do that at the French border in a cold-”

Tara started humming in an attempt to cover Sophie’s recriminations, her hands tracing large patterns under Sophie’s shirt.

“ _Cold_ railway station. Are you even listening?”

“I stopped listening when your collarbones happened”, Tara whispered in Sophie’s neck. “I paid the innkeeper with the leftover rubies. We could stay a month and be besieged by flocks of comperes; I think he won’t sell us out.”

“Oh, you are terrible.”

Sophie, resigned, leaned back into Tara’s embrace at last. Tara cocked an eyebrow in triumph. Tonight it will be cozy restaurant on la Rambla. Providing Tara deigned to go out at all.

“Now, you know me, I’ll never say ‘no’ to dressing up, but can we get rid of the-“

The coffee table they had pushed aside to move the bags more easily exploded suddenly, leaving only a cloud of wood dust and a raggedly man.

“What the-“ Sophie yelled, gathering the feathers protectively in her arms.

Tara should probably have taken offense to that, but she had already jumped off the bed to grab a knife. Money, life, in that order. That’s why they liked each other.

The man, coughing and pestering, was in an appalling state, covered from head to toe by what has been the coffee table, pulverized. He must have materialized right in the middle of it, as indicated by the swirl-like bruises appearing on his calves. They were specific to a failed displacement of this type. Inaccurate calculations, unexpected obstacles, hazards of the trade. Tara winced.

The man didn’t seem to want to attack them, but he also knew enough about the room not to end up impaled on the balcony. Never trust a man with blue eyes and a detailed knowledge of your room, however temporary.

After another coughing fit, the stranger held out a dusty hand and simply said: “Michelle Obama”.


	2. Act I

Hardison climbed down from the counter, satisfied of the reassuring speech he had given to the room. The customers didn’t seem bothered by the explosion, which was arguably common within these walls, but their continued indifference looked more and more alarming with the passing of time and explosions in the backroom. He had found out at some point people just assumed they were trying a little too hard to experiment new beer mixes.

Which they did.

At times.

But the health department couldn’t know that.

As long as no 300-year-old bark tree from the deepest forests of Amazonia were harmed, he didn’t see the need in informing them. Still. “Alarming customers” should be the next topic of their bi-monthly co-owners assembly.

Grabbing a glass to busy his hands, Hardison glanced at Sophie, still talking to their client at a nearby table. He was starting to wonder when exactly he would get Sophie’s signal to join in because he was feeling a little left behind, rambling as he had been about “that next gen Stereo system you experienced live just now for the first time in our pub, ladies and gentlemen NOT an explosion”. Not the best way to impress a future client. But Sophie had her compassionate client face and, upon catching his eyes, simply quirked eyebrow. She didn’t need company.

Eliot stumbled out at last from the backroom, wiping his glasses, and visibly crying. Concerned, Hardison left the counter to meet him, but soon recognized his muffled sobs as evident laughter.

Hardison crossed his arms, bracing for the nonsense. This was going to be a long case.

“Okay. I assumed when Parker said it was nothing and we shouldn’t worry, she was embellishing the truth, but I wasn’t expecting…“

Eliot crouched down behind the counter to retrieve one of their customized glasses and filled it at the tap. He was hiccupping:

“He – Nate – Nate turned our coffee table into a pile of toothpicks.”

Hardison blinked, not ready to uncross his arms.

“You mean he _accidentally_ made it explode?”

“No, he – he wanted to practice his space alteration and he transformed the table into a neatly piled stack of toothpicks.”

Eliot had put down his glass to mime the pile of toothpick with his hands as if it was of capital importance to his explanation.

“Is Parker helping him putting the table back together?” Hardison was failing to see how funny or even essential this conversation was. His gaze went back to Sophie and their potential client, drawn in.

“They lost a toothpick.” Eliot dissolved into laughter, unable to crush the irrepressible image of two adults looking for a shard of wood.

Hardison dragged a hand across his face. Parker and Nate would need to find that damn toothpick to put the table back together entirely. Even magic couldn’t escape Lavoisier. If only magic tricks were as simple and illogical in movies, they’d all have a better time practicing it. But then someone like Nate would have probably taken over the world.

Hardison shook his head and handed away the glass Eliot hadn’t touched.

“Can we go back to the –“

Eliot was bent in two, furiously swiping his glasses as he was trying to regain a semblance of composure in front of Hardison.

_Jesus._

Hardison turned his back to him and strode to the table where Sophie was receiving their guests. The woman sitting at her side looked only slightly older than Hardison, cold dark skin with determined eyes and hyperactive hands, smartly dressed with a colourful scarf on her head. She nodded at him when Sophie introduced her colleague as Hardison and the young woman as Ms-

“Hager is fine. We don’t have much time for that, sorry, Hardison. I have to be back in court in half an hour.”

Hager sighed, her fingers tracing the handle of her cup.

“Your colleague will explain to you the details of my story, our story rather. I know very well who you are, by the way.”

A smile sneaked on her lips, impish.

“Most of my colleagues do. Perhaps unfortunately for you. But not for me. I just have one question: can you take down an industrial compound and make them pay for the years of poisoning they inflicted on a small town?”

Hardison lifted his chin at the challenge. He was going to enjoy this one.

 

***

 

“How did she get wind of this case particularly? More than 1/5 of the American population is or have been concerned with unclean water. In the past twenty years, alone-”

Nate had given up his quest for the missing toothpick and everyone was doing their very best to ignore the neat pile where the coffee table had stood.

“Nate”, Hardison sighed. “Stop with the statistics, honestly.”

“She has family living there”, Sophie called from the other end of the room. “And a few weeks ago she was contacted because Yasin, an employee had denounced the factory dumping waste outside the town. It’s a small community and their water filtering system is minimal. Their water comes directly from a source. They had no idea they’ve been drinking tainted water for the past year.”

“They hoped to use the case to raise awareness”, Eliot whispered, impressed.

Parker had to agree this was courageous. Most of the companies they had taken down for this kind of crimes didn’t hesitate to silence their enemies. Hager, from what Hardison had told them, knew that, but fought all the same.

“Of course, they were rebuffed for lack of evidence”, Hardison continued, with one finger leading the parade of journal clippings and web pages about the trial on the screen. “Yasin and Hager couldn’t prove he wasn’t the sole instigator of the contamination. His employers were fined. He was fired. All that jazz.”

Sophie was bent over the desk across the room, her eyes leafing through the information on the computer screen.

“There is very little Hager can do for now”, she said matter-of-factly. “Internet campaigns aren’t enough, lawyers aren’t enough. Yasin knew what he was getting into when he denounced them, he was ready to fight for the community. He doesn’t care about his job, he cares about what will happen to everyone back home, people like Hager’s aunt and uncle.”

“We need a lot more intel to build anything against them,” Parker grumbled from the armchair’s back, feet nearly in Hardison’s lap.

She lightly jumped to her feet and walked to Sophie’s side, nudging her aside to take a look at the computer screen. It was infographics and charts about the company. Sophie knew this was easier for her to memorize.

From his spot, isolated, Nate hummed in agreement. He was leaning against Hardison’s working table, chin pressed against his chest.

“Hardison, Eliot, you’re going ahead, see how things are run there and try to get inside.”

Eliot stood up from the arm of the sofa, making Hardison jump in surprise.

“How ‘inside’ exactly?” He growled with interest.

“Hu, ho”, Sophie simply commented, looking at Parker sideways.

Nate was smirking. A bit. Just enough for Hardison to catch on he was not going to enjoy this recon mission. Hardison was already glaring at Nate when the mastermind cleared his throat and asked, cocky:

“Hardison, how long are you willing to sacrifice?”

The young man sprung to his feet and planted his fists on his hips.

“Hell no, Nate!” He cried. “I’m not doing this again. It messes with my sleeping schedules, my gaming schedules, my snacking schedules, my exercising schedules, my-“

“You are literally the least affected by time travel.” Eliot had joined him in the middle of the room and grabbed his forearm with a tenderness betraying just how delighted he was to do a straightforward long  recon mission with the young man. “Be less genius at tweaking energy and maybe you’ll get to pass.”

Hardison turned to Nate and enunciated:

“The man is insulting me and my need now.”

“Hardison…” Sophie sighed, her eyes leaving the screen to take a few notes.

Nate had left his spot and was leaning against the armchair back.

“You get _my_ car. For the amount of time you spent in the past”, Nate offered. The gleam in his eyes was quite sharp, like a 40-carat diamond. Hardison didn’t stand a chance.

“And you pay for the fuel and cleaning.”

Nate dipped his head forward in concession.

“We need…” He looked at Sophie and Parker, engrossed in the study of the company organization chart. Parker lifted a thumb. “Oh, really? One week.”

“Month.” Sophie corrected before walking to a very vexed Eliot.

Hardison was about to protest when Nate retrieved the keys from his pockets and slung them at him. The young man simply snickered and walked away to the first store to pack.  

 “I adore you, dear”, Sophie whispered to Eliot as she walked by him. “But your short to mid-long con abilities need work. So you’re going to do this one the old-fashioned way.”

Parker shut off the computer and strolled to them.

“So, Sophie and I are going incognito in the office and they’re going incognito in the countryside.”

Nate was pretty much doing a little jig inside. He offered an arm to Sophie who merely rolled her eye at him.

“Let’s go steal the ground!”

Parker leaned in to Eliot’s ear and whispered:

“Isn’t the ground free?”

 

***

 

Eliot felt the hair at the back of his neck stiffen and crackle with statics before he could see the stark cold sky of the plains. Hardison stumbled out of his grip and started jumping up and down, arms making circles in an attempt to shake the sensation away. Eliot liked it though. It was part of the fun.

As always when they were in uncharted territories, Eliot had preferred to materialize far outside the zone and hitch a ride to the town in question. The sand lifted by their displacement began to settle around them. From afar, two strangers appearing on the side of the road near a big rock wouldn’t look like more than a dust storm. Most of the drivers didn’t notice. And Eliot had already done it astride an elephant.

Hardison begrudgingly readjusted his satchel across his chest and began walking alongside the dry road. At least, Eliot had agreed to go back and pick the remainder of his equipment once they’d be set up in a suitable room. Hardison had seemed glad enough of the suite he had found them online. He had used the word “suite” after all.

“I hate everything about this”, the young man was mumbling under his breath. He dusted off an imaginary patch of sand on his shoulder and walked faster. The thunder of two motorcycles passed them and Eliot took wider strides to catch up with Hardison.

“Sophie, Parker and Nate will have to take a shitty train to get here as to not blow their cover”, Eliot said, annoyed. “A train with defunct air-conditioning, exhausted passengers and people who think gouda is cheese. You really think we got it that bad?”

Hardison huffed in disdain, but he knew very well Eliot was right. The antics were merely distractions from his anxiety over being displaced in time and space. With the amount of science-fiction the young man was consuming, it was nothing short of a miracle the kid ever agreed to follow Eliot. He was too afraid of accidentally preventing his own birth or something. But the gain of time, particularly in urban transport, won over Hardison on their third case together.

Hardison had perched, rather gracefully at that, on a rock a good ten feet ahead of Eliot, and was drawing on the back of his sketchbook.

Eliot narrowed his eyes.

“What are you-“

“Look, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And my honey is very superior.”

Eliot looked at him with incomprehension.

“I’m making a sign to at least indicate where we are heading”, Hardison said. “You stop the cars. With my luck I’ll pick a soul-eating alien commuter.”

“I thought you said you had dropped _Agents of S.P.A.C.E._ because they kept killing all the black characters.”

Hardison jogged to his side, holding before him the sign now adorned with what Eliot could best describe as enluminure.

“You say this as if I have a choice in sci-fi shows with black folks”, Hardison cried. “Dead or alive!”

“Hey, buddy. Next time, we’ll do a heist in L.A. and get Sophie to okay a show where everyone stays alive.”

“Not Jack. I don’t really care for Jack. He can die.”

Eliot was starting to ponder whether he would have to pick a later time in the day or walk to town when a small blue car pulled over. Eliot patted Hardison’s shoulder with satisfaction and hurried to the passenger’s window, a bright smile on the face.

“Good morning, M’am. Thank you!”

The driver was a burly woman with a face wrinkled by sun and laughter. Her free hand made an energetic wheel in the air and she chirped:

“You kids going to Paris? Hop back there.”

Hardison craned his head over Eliot’s shoulder to shoot a beaming smile at her and pushed him aside to take the seat beside the driver.

“Always here for the gossip”, Eliot muttered while he grabbed the bag Hardison had left on the side of the road and hopped inside the junker.

“By the way, that’s such a pretty sign. How exactly did you do that“, the woman started, as the car was getting back on the road.

“I’m gifted.” Hardison was grinning.

Hardison and Jean quickly fell into easy banter. It involved a surprising amount of nerd talks as it turned out their driver had recently discovered, thanks to her daughter, god only knows what saga Hardison was reading at the moment. Gone were the sore muscles of the young man. Eliot could only hope Hardison had booked them a place with an adult bathtub this time. At the very least a sensible shower.

Jean was driving further north and dropped them off near the town house with a joyous wave. They walked to their hotel, in silence, half in reverence despite the lightness of their road trip: people’s lives were poisoned here because the inhabitants lacked the cash to clear the soil of the noxious chemicals. Eliot had realized early in the preparation that Parker’s and Hardison’s abilities could likely handle their needs of clean water, as they didn’t want to buy locally bottles the people were struggling to acquire.

Eliot had braced himself for something different. The town was nothing like the scrappy patch of dirt where he had grown up. It was a previously rich center that had suffered from the rapid decline of the various industries in the area. The infrastructures, however efficient in the past, had been left to rot, as the community couldn’t raise the funds to maintain them, and the Haddock’s company had taken advantage of it. To them, it was already a landfill site.

As they were looking for a coffee shop, they encountered Yasin, the transporter who opposed the company first. He was still in the middle of his trials then. A nice man, with a taste for joining impromptu football games and talking about birds. They sat together outside the Café Cherry and Yasin told them, in his words, his story, this town’s story. Eliot only felt then that they had reached their destination.

In the following weeks, he would become Hardison and Eliot’s prime source of information about the factory outside the city.

 

***

 

Nate checked his watch again and flattened the newspaper on his lap. The waiter took away his coffee and replaced it with another and Nate considered again the tall building housing the Haddock’s parent company offices, on the fourteenth floor.

Sophie and Parker, at the other end of the coms, were chatting with employees. Parker in that cheerful tone that always seemed coincidental on her part, but managed to get just as much intel as Sophie. Sophie talked less this time, which meant she was planting seeds for something to use later.

Or she was doing whatever Sophie could do with her marks and that he had never understood or even witnessed.    

Nate knew what he was getting into when he stumbled into collaboration with Parker, Hardison and Eliot. He had chased them all at one point or another in his career, studied their habits and tells. If he hadn’t been able to catch them, it was not for his own shortcomings; they were the best at what they did. What he hadn’t been expecting upon working closer with them, even from Sophie who he thought he knew like the back of his pocket, was that they were tricksters. All of them.

You could find them, naturally, in every field – he himself took pride in having perfected one or two clever tricks - but the world didn’t see their skills as something remarkable. Pretty for magic shows, sure; handy for performing certain tasks faster, naturally – like getting clients to confess to fraud, although he would never have admitted it to his former bosses. In the end, very few people who had been gifted with such abilities or who had worked at it managed to make a proper living out of it. Like drawing or dancing.

But, of his group of thieves, all of them were tricksters.

_“I mean, what did you expect? Stealing requires a variety of skills. Some people are good with numbers, I am good with energy bending, baby.” Hardison hadn’t blinked at Nate’s obvious bafflement when Nate at confronted the young man with his doubts regarding some of his truly impressive abilities._

_“Baby?”_

_“That’s what you decided you would take issue with. Not the stealing? Not the cool energy bending? It’s the informal gender neutral ‘baby’.”_

_“I’m processing.”_

_Nate had been, truly, processing the information. It was perhaps their second case together when Hardison had just barreled into a private army herd on an empty fuel tank._

_“I’m also crazy gifted at hacking and painting, if it can help”, Hardison had sung, cheeky. “No tricks required. Pure, unaltered genius. Except when I alter it and then it’s magic, baby.”_

He had discovered it very naturally, gradually, for each member of the crew, with as much casualness as he would learn that Sophie had a sweet tooth or that Eliot fluently spoke Klingon. How could he have known? He wasn’t exactly watching after them during their interventions and he certainly didn’t need to know the details of their process in committing crimes.

_“You can rearrange matter?”_

_It was very much rhetorical as he had just witnessed Parker walk through a wall turned water-like surface. Parker shrugged in answer and resumed nagging her bowl of cereals, as she chirped:_

_“Among other things. But that’s my specialty. Like play-do. Avoiding lasers is funnier when you can stop air from moving. Or make things explode.”_

_“I don’t see how that’s even…”_

_Her spoon clinked on the porcelain with enthusiasm._

_“It is.” She looked down at her mid-afternoon snack and made a grim face. “Do you have any other kind of cereals? Those become mushy too quickly.”_

_“Can’t you just slow down the process?”_

_The glare she directed at him could have burnt him on the spot._

_“Slowed-down cereals don’t taste good. You should know about that. I thought you knew stuff.”_

Of course, he wouldn’t spit on the advantages it was bringing to the table in their profession. As time went on, it meant worrying less about certain aspects of the con, even if, like all skills, magic wasn’t infallible. But he really could have done without knowing a huge portion of the criminal world was intertwined with the trickster world.

_“It’s because society as it is doesn’t recognize and value our skills”, Eliot had scolded him. Eliot always sounded like he was scolding Nate when he was talking about tricksters and their place in society.  “Schools, jobs, entertainment, even relationships: people look down on our abilities, calling it ‘gifts’ as if it hadn’t taken years to perfect. But, no, they can’t make easy money on it. We’re lazy and deceiving,  cheats and thieves. So what? We created our own world, with our rules.”_

_“That’s… even worse.” Nate gulped down his unease. Eliot’s abilities seemed disproportionately powerful, although it could be merely the aftermath of their recent brush off with Eliot’s past. “An alternative society that does not abide by the same rules as everyone’s?”_

_Eliot stopped kneading the dough on Nate’s counter and growled at Nate:_

_“Nate, we are everyone. Or rather part of this ‘everyone’ who lives by rules that are unfair to anyone who doesn’t conform and you know it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone after Dubenich and all the others at all. Besides, we don’t do anything people without tricks wouldn’t do. At least we have honor: I wouldn’t use my power to throw people into space before the Big Bang or leave them on top of mount Everest.”_

_“Why would you even do that?”_

_“Some people have issues they are not proud of, okay?”_

Needless to say, this hadn’t reassured him one bit. But then, technically, he was part of that world. He was a trickster and a thief.

Perhaps the most surprising had been Sophie: he thought shared with her a sense of intimacy and implicit understanding in most things. He had run after and with her for so many years, for almost as long as he had worked in insurance, yet he had never suspected her abilities or their extent.

She had not surprised him with a casual demonstration of power, like Hardison had done, or forgotten “the less talented of us” had been in the room and torn apart the very fabric of the world under his astonished eyes, like Parker, or even acknowledged his abilities over a beer like it was nothing more than a hobby, like Eliot.

She had said nothing after everyone had been unmasked and left him marinating with doubts until he blankly asked her after he had seen _something_ that could or really could not have been a trick to pick an orange on the counter.

_“Yes. Of course. I practice tricks.”_

_He had been expecting that. And she had been expecting his reaction, judging by the bemused tilt of her head._

_“You seem almost offended”, she said._

_“I thought you of all people would be normal.”_

_She didn’t answer with that cutting light laughter she would use on occasion when he said something deliberately vexing. ’Normal’ was a delicate word to use around Sophie. She simply stared at him with weariness for an uncomfortable amount of time before talking._

_“I’ve never let you believe anything about me that wasn’t wanted on my part”, she simply breathed. “I’m good at what I do.”_

_Nate stepped closer to her, tempted to seduce her into telling him her secrets, like they had done so many times when he was the cat and she was the mouse. Almost secrets. To Sophie, they were coins to be traded for delightful banter and the illusion of romance._

_“What do you do?” he whispered, leaning in her ear. “Sophie, what exactly was what I saw? Is this telekinesis? Ubiquity? Some form of matter manipulation like Parker?”_

_She took a sip of her glass and crooked a smile._

_“Still as good as ever.”_

For a while he had been mostly afraid of his crew and then he forgot they were even different from the rest of the world. Because the rest of the world was like them.

_“So. Do you all have names?”_

_“Names?” Hardison eructed, putting down the watch he was working on._

_“Like “The Dark Ranger” or “Flash Wizard” or however you feel like calling yourself.”_

_Hardison emphatically raised his hands to the sky._

_“Alexander Hardison. Names! He thought we were fancy Domino’s orders or what.”_

Sophie’s hand fell on his shoulder, jolting him out of his memories. Parker, somehow, had exited the building with a whole box of files and a stuffed tiger plushy. He opened his mouth but Sophie widened her eyes in a recognizable “don’t ask” rebuttal. Parker appeared extremely proud of herself.

At least, Nate would be treated to an entertaining story on the trip to Paris.

 

***

 

On a scale of one to Hardison, Sophie wasn’t especially comfortable to sleep on: a 34, and Parker was being nice. Sophie talked a lot, for one thing, sometimes to throw a quip to Nate, sometimes to try out new voices. Yet Parker had to admit the hair stroking she fell into every now and then was most welcome after the terrible bun Parker had to endure at the office.

Parker didn’t mind the train ride from the city where they had landed to the small city of Paris. It wasn’t long, 30 minutes max, yet it was difficult to believe Paris was in the same county as Chicago, so different was their situation.

 Nate and Sophie both had stuff to study, to get in-character and to find a usable angle for attack, and Parker had sleep to catch up on. The way both of them were commenting the case, comparing notes and strategies out loud in the empty car, Parker could entirely do without the studying.

According to Eliot and Hardison, the Haddock Brothers were vicious men who didn’t care who they needed to bribe or intimidate to ensure their factories were still running. Their first instinct in the most simple of situations was to crush people: they recognized brute managerial force as the only way to accomplish anything from silencing syndicates to order a cup of coffee. Which meant getting them to trust Nate and Sophie for the hook would be close to impossible.

Sophie’s hand scratched Parker’s head, signaling that the woman turned pillow wanted to stretch her legs before they reached their destination. Parker swung up, sitting face to face with a snoring Nate, and moved her legs aside to let Sophie take a walk. She retrieved her com from her pocket to take a peek at what Hardison and Eliot were up to in Paris. Although they had been gone for only two days from her perspective, she had missed their physical presence a great deal and Nate and Sophie had done their best to accommodate her bouts of hugging session.

After a month of recon, the boys were still tasked with finding a way into the brothers’ entourage, which involved a lot of playing cards with local factory workers. At the moment, Hardison was getting lost in a game of poker on a terrace judging by the ambient noises, while Eliot was… not gathering much information either.

“Eliot!” Parker harshly whispered.

Judging by the confusion at the end of the com, he had been startled and was trying to find an excuse to dip under the table to answer.

_Parker! Sophie told me you were sleeping._

“Obviously, not anymore. Do you have anything yet?”

Parker’s furious whispering had woken Nate as well, who was now following the conversation with a studious frown.

_Hardison learned from one of the workers that we would need to get inside their vault at the bank._

Parker sighed with content. The words were music to her ears after the endless parlays of the office. 

 _How good am I, huh?_ Hardison’s attempt at a whisper boomed inside their ears, making Sophie jump at the other end of the wagon.

“Hardison, don’t amplify the signal when you’re on”, she cried, rubbing the base of her ears. “It bloody hurts.”

_Sorry. Listen, according to Steph one of the Haddock brothers’ assets is stored in the bank because they couldn’t be bothered to install proper security at the factory._

_Hardison! Get out from under that table, we are going to be…_

_Daniel, what are you doing under there? We said no canoodling for the duration of the-_ a loud voice joined in from their end of the conversation, rapidly drowned in a concert of chairs and unconvincing explanations. The conversation at the end of the com line shifted entirely to the game at play and Parker, Sophie and Nate were left looking at each other with a bereft expression on the face.

“Well, that was useful”, Parker concluded.

“So, do we raid their safe?” Sophie crossed her feet beneath her on the seat. “Can’t we just do it on the spot? A good old breaking and entering.”

“Nothing breaks where I go”, Parker said.

“Ladies, maybe, we should think this through.”

They soon reached their destination, much to Nate’s displeasure. He had hoped to shape the plan a  little more before jumping in, but Parker, and Sophie thankfully, were itching to steal something and quick. And Nate was left piecing together a plan with whatever they would find in that vault.

Parker changed her clothes while stepping out of the train station, while Sophie did whatever she was doing to refresh her appearance on the run. Nate, of course, still had no clue what it was and Sophie loved it. No doubt the number in the hall had sent him reeling with speculations.

When they arrived at the bank, no more than a street away from the station, Eliot and Hardison were already there, taking pictures of a small dog and his owner on the side walk opposite the bank. Parker ran to them and embraced them fiercely.

“We have a date tonight?”

Hardison fondly laughed, disentangling his limbs from Parker’s.

“Eliot? Care to do me the honours?” Nate walked up to them with Sophie, a slight bounce to his step. Nothing like a good hold robbery in bright daylight.

Eliot had waved the man and his dog goodbye and was looking at the pictures on his camera. He looked preoccupied.

“Can’t do. They’ve got a metal mangrove  set up. I go in, without an exact visual; I end up in more parts than Hardison’s watch.”

Hardison let out a cry of outrage that rumbled through Parker’s ribcage. She had really missed them.

“It’s a WIP!”

Sophie squinted her eyes at Nate.

“What’s a mangrove set?” she asked in a curious voice.

“An intricate web of magical metal rope”, Nate explained, a hand rubbing his chin. Eliot gave him a harsh look and Parker silently agreed would not be beneath using such a torture device. “I have seen the device installed only once and  it was precisely to order its removal. The insurance company did not want to deal with the cost of an accident or a thief’s recovery. The damages for anyone caught in the maze, trickster or not, are extended and brutal.”

Sophie’s mouth contorted in a way that suggested she was more familiar with its effects as she let on.

“How very generous of your bosses”, Eliot rasped, looking pointedly at Nate.

Nate responded with a glare, clearly unwilling to engage in an argument over anti-trickster technology.

“Parker”, he resumed. “How long would you take to get inside the vault?”

Parker was scanning the specs on Hardison’s phone.

“Going by the age of the building, the blueprints and the estimated value of what is inside, I’d wager they don’t have use for anything tougher than a Garrison 98, maybe a Bentley OS-8. The owners in this part of the state tend to favour those. I can deal with the locks in 5 minutes, give or take. The metal mangrove should not be much trouble getting around for me. But I need help with the cameras. I am blind here and I assume you don’t want us to be seen at all.”

Nate smirked.

“Hardison?”

“Onto it. We’ll set up a loop for the vault.” Hardison whipped out his computer. “Don’t worry, the bank had not closed its doors yet, which is arguably part of the fun.”

“I assume I am to be the face of the robbery? I will distract the employees with…” she paused, dramatically.”An Irish eccentric with a taste for small American towns. With her…” she stepped close to Nate and flicked the lapels of his vest. ”Her Danish butler.”

Nate seemed too stunned to quip back.

“I’m guessing we’re going full front teeth with the Haddocks to get their trust?”

Eliot whistled.

“Oh, they are not going to trust us after that.”

“They are going to fear us and it’s even better.” Sophie’s smile was definitely shark-like. Except prettier.

Nate, at least, seemed afraid and charmed.

“Sophie…”

Sophie winked at him, before extracting her work phone from her pocket and typing a number. She announced with a bored expression and a drastically different voice that she was calling to inform they were about to be robbed.

“Please, feel free to contact me later.”

“Oh, we’re doing this?” Parker almost shouted with delight when Sophie hung up. She could not believe her luck. Nate clearly could not believe anything.

“Perhaps, we should-“

“Yeah”, Parker snickered. “You’re right. We should not waste more time in preparing our entrance. I think we can do it in seven minutes. Tops.”

Hardison would have clapped if his hands hadn’t been holding and powering the laptop.

“And I can give Parker a lift to the hall”, Eliot added in relief.

“Awww”, Hardison cooed from behind his computer. “We would not have left you out, don’t worry.”

Eliot grumbled, but could not repress a smile when Parker leaped in his arms and they both disappeared from the spot.

“Kurt, the game is on”, Sophie sang, making a bee-line to the bank entrance.


	3. Act II

As it turned out, Hardison’s boosting powers were not a match for the bad internet at the hotel - _this is like the final boss of bad connection up there_ , as Hardison had proclaimed – and they had quickly reconvened at the _Café Cherry,_ Hardison, Eliot and Yasin’s haunt for the past month.

Plotting crimes in broad daylight added a spice that required far too much shifting glances and hushed tones for Hardison’s comfort, but the perks were having Sophie do whatever she was doing to the clients and Nate intensely scrutinizing her every movement in hope of catching her in the act.

Eliot came back with an armful of drinks – tea and hot chocolate were the only non-alcoholic beverage available, but it didn’t deter them from emptying the bar’s supply each time they were in need of better internet.

Parker was sandwiched on a bench between Sophie and him, leaving Nate beside Eliot playing footsie with whatever bizarrely uncomfortable stool he was trying to stay on.

Sophie took a sip of her tea, her strained frame slouching visibly, and inquired, with a hint of doubt in the voice:

“So, this is the lame duck?”  

“Aha, the _Peking_ lame duck!” Nate, at least sounded awake, he probably had been playing interferences during the entire duration of the recons back in Portland.

Sophie, upon hearing Peking, abandoned her drink to shift excitedly on the bench, leaving Parker room enough to suspiciously sniff at Sophie’s black tea.

Hardison really wished he had started writing that con dictionary he had been bragging about.

“Is it different from the rubber duck?” Parker tried from a spot near the table that should have given Sophie’s concern for her drink.

“It’s actually pretty much a lame duck rillettes”, Eliot enthused. “Rather nice.”

“Except with a stage!” Sophie was giddy with excitement.

Parker sat back against the bench, seemingly redirecting her attention to the conversation.

“Oh, I think I call that a platypus”, she matter-of-factly said. 

Eliot almost snorted back his home-made attempt at a chai latte in surprise.

“A platypus?” Nate seemed outraged but jaded, a combination Hardison had only observed in Nate running on tea.

“Yes”, Parker stated.

They stared at each other for a while, enough for Sophie to come to the realization Parker had swapped their drink at some point and that hot chocolate was now her fate in life. Hardison’s fingers were impatiently drumming on the wax cloth, impervious to Sophie’s silent outrage and resignation.

“And still”, Hardison prompted. “No one is explaining what a Peking lame rillettes is.”

Nate and Parker turned their attention back to him, with an evident blink of relief on the face.

“The idea is to sell as dead a product that is very much alive and kicking”, Nate explained.

Hardison seemed dubious. He extended an arm toward Sophie’s nook and silently picked her drink to place his own green tea in its place. Sophie breathed a small “thank you”.

“Are we going to send them lions?” Hardison joked.

“More or less. You’re right to go there.”

“It’s when you hand a grenade to someone by telling them it’s harmless and it isn’t”, Parker elaborated.

Eliot grunted his approval.

“Creepy. But accurate.”

They were going at this problem in a way that wasn’t sitting well with Hardison, although he couldn’t exactly tell how yet.

“So something that is dangerous to them”, he tried. “And that they want rendered harmless?”

“That’s why Sophie and I raided their offices”, Parker dreamily added.

Sophie seemed to have spent an equally fun time at that offices it seemed because she was smirking as she recounted:

“Word of mouth is worth word of God. Learn from them what they fear the most. The company wants to expand its buildings on the current theatre ground. They’ve been trying to maneuver the mayor out of financing the venue for months now. Yasin’s trial slowed down the process. The theatre is a thorn in their side. They want it gone.”

Hardison shook his head.

“They deserve to die, honestly.”

“In due time”, Eliot smiled, with a wink for Hardison, which was both threatening and flirty. It shouldn’t have brought comfort to Hardison. “We’re going to offer to get rid of the nuisance.”

“Except we won’t”, Nate murmured.

“And how does the stage kick back in this particular instance? They are a bunch of kids with lots of cardboard and some very good verses. That ain’t enough.”

“Ouh, can I do that?” Sophie was practically bouncing on her seat with impatience and Hardison regretted giving her more tea.

“Sorry, Sophie, you can’t.” Nate had the decency to look slightly sorry.  “I need you front row for this. Look you already introduced yourself to the brothers.”

You haven’t seen disappointment until you’ve watched Sophie been deprived of an opportunity to lead a theater troupe into crime.

“What you are going to do is give them the idea of using your manpower for sabotaging purpose”, Nate continued and Sophie sensibly perked up. “Make them think they came up with the idea of using the new big bad in town for their own profit.”

“Good old fashioned suggestion”, she seemed titillated. “I like this job. Minimal magic and non-stop Noir. I’m going to be Phyllis Dietrichson.”

“Who’s doing Sophie then?” Parker asked, troubled. Although Nate had noted Parker was unhinged by Sophie’s recent tendency to use femme fatales as inspiration. He looked in the hacker’s direction.

“Hardison is going to do it.”

 

***

 

Most of “Hardison is going to do it” didn’t stray from what Hardison had actually been doing in the last month. He may have been taking more cues from Sophie to energetically nudge the troupe in a state of intense activity and creativity that would catch the factory directors’ attention this time around, but other than that he was still spending most of his time on stage advising the actors or backstage working out some tricks to get that sartorial goat to stay in the air for the second act. A literal goat with expensive and eccentric tastes in clothes: perks of doing theatre in a small rural town, apparently. 

The play they had been staging for months prior to Hardison’s arrival was an original penned by Catalina of the general store. Hardison was pretty sure he had never read anything as funny, modern and creative as this piece of writing. Catalina, between her kids and her job, unfortunately lacked the time to participate in the repetitions as often as she would have wanted, but she had granted Zeke most of her editorial power and the young man was doing a fine job at adjusting the text to their need.

It wasn’t like they had to pretend to look busy when one of the company’s minions would need a gym mattress from the storeroom to spy on them; they were working their hardest to put on a beautiful show and Hardison had no doubt it would be one.

So far, three different goons had interrupted a truly impressive revue number involving high kicking lines of boys and girls in sparkly uniforms, an underwater Shakespearean circus interlude and a soft but utterly soul-wracking reading of grocery lists. The third guy had been found sobbing between the only standing ping-pong table and the only sensible yoga mattress left.

Of course, to spice up the threat the kids were supposed to embody for the factory, Parker had to fake a few phone calls from an interested, albeit stoned-sounding, journalist, and Sophie had to loom outside the small theatre, forlorn and menacing, as she wanted nothing but to take her part in the creating process. To reassure the kids who had caught sight of her, he had joked she was like their fairy godfather, all dark looks and broodiness, but a patron of the arts nonetheless.

Eliot, as the indie photographer, was supposed to do a photo report on them. Alas, it didn’t go exactly as planned and up somehow ended up racing after Eliot up on the lighting rail and the goons probably now thought Eliot was dead.

Which he wasn’t. He was very good at displacing himself mid-air.

“We can probably use my ghost later. It’s a good thing. Gabriel can go on a trip until we decide to use him again”, Eliot argued, trying to wipe away the blood from his face. He had still hit at full speed a heavy curtain and scratched himself during the fight.

“Daniel” Hardison corrected. He opened the first aid kit and swatted the hitter hand away from his face, determined to do the cleaning himself.

“It’s not a very distinctive name”, Eliot grumbled. “You’re not helping by insisting on using ‘El’ as a nickname. El does not fit my persona.”

Hardison took a compress and heated it in his hand before gently applying it to Eliot’s face.

“Eliot. El. Daniel”, he enunciated.

“I was not asking you to explain….“ Eliot pinched the bridge of his nose, forcing Hardison to suspend his task. “Look, I’m going to give your troupe lessons on stunt work because that’s clearly not an area where they’re experts. They could have seriously hurt themselves.”

“Says the man whose face currently looks like the map of Mordor.” Hardison crossed his arms on his chest and took in the full strength of Eliot’s glare. “Aren’t you afraid my kids will freak out if you come at the theatre with knives and whatnot?”

The hitter squinted.

“Hardison, they already think we’re a couple.” He got up and snatched the compress away from Hardison’t hands, gesturing wildly in his face. “And not your _kids_ , Hardison, Etta could play bridge with your Nana. Stop calling them that, it’s ridiculous. I’m leaving. Sophie needs me for something.”

“There’s no age to play bridge!” Hardison called out behind Eliot.

 

***

 

Parker dropped the piece of scenery behind the stairs with a grunt of appreciation. She had no idea what it was supposed to represent in any way but it was without certainty one of Hardison’s best work. It was so blue.

She stretched and yawned as she walked back onto the stage, readjusting her gloves in search of the other blue thing Zeke and Mariana had asked her to move. When she passed the back door, she caught a glimpse of Hardison closing the door angrily at Nate.

Hardison sitting on top the back of a seat, alone except for a forgotten sweater. Gan’s, going by the patterns. He looked like he was praying and Parker didn’t have the heart to speak when she hopped beside him.

Hardison was different from Eliot. When he was upset, you could ask him and he would answer, and the answer could be more scary than Eliot’s stubborn silence. Everything was going according to plan, considering the plan was pretty much letting them believe Sophie was putting the theatre company out of business and blackmailing the Haddocks. It wasn’t clean, but the Haddocks were willing to let a town poison itself.

“Hey, what’s this about?” Parker timidly asked after a while.

“I don’t feel comfortable using them like that”, Hardison blankly said. “These people, these kids, for some of them that stage is all they have. It’s not fair.”

Parker frowned, not sure if she had to disagree with him to argue what was probably Nate’s point, but that Nate certainly flunked because he was a jerk.

“We won’t put them in any danger. And we are doing this for them anyway.”

“Yeah, but people are not puppets. They are the fiddle and they don’t know it. In their place, I’d like a say in this, I’d like the opportunity to fight back against the company.”

“That’s what we are trying to get them though. They are in no position to. For now. When everything’s over I can get Eliot to teach them how to leave them to die in space.”

Hardison grimaced, until his eyes found her face and took note of her expression.

“Not funny.”

They quietly sat together, comfortable. Somehow Parker could sense that her silence was helping more than her words, because she could see the emotions and ideas passing on his face, like car lights on the ceiling. Alec was the smartest man she knew, even more so than Nate, and she trusted him. And he knew that she trusted him, which is why a conversation at this point would have been superfluous. He was still thinking when Eliot appeared in the middle of the stage carrying a trunk of clothes Parker had just moved.

“Gan wants to rehearse the flower scene later” he offered as an answer to Parker’s silent question.

He didn’t question Hardison’s intense posture, simply jogged over to sit beside him.

“Nate’s coming with Sophie”, Eliot commented, almost annoyed. “She should be about to close the deal.” 

“What if them being scared is not enough to get them to pay?” Hardison loudly spoke, as if he was addressing a larger audience.

“Oh, it will be. Sophie’s scary like that and they are weasels like that.” He stopped, considering the younger man with a soft, intent scrutiny. “But this isn’t about us closing the case, right?”

Hardison rubbed the back of his head and bent his neck backwards, looking up in concentration. Parker mirrored him, but swung all the way back to the seat behind her. Planking between two old theatre seats wasn’t the most comfortable of positions, but she enjoyed the darkness of the ceiling, far up ahead with its projectors sleeping like bats.

“We owe them more than money, Alec,” Eliot whispered.

“I know.” Alec’s voice was so small. It sounded like they were confessing in the night instead of plotting in the afternoon.

But it was a confession of sort, Parker mused. Alec and Eliot loved the members of the troupe and even if Nate was always telling them a con should never be allowed to become personal, every con was precisely that. Otherwise he wouldn’t insist on gloating before their mark at the end of each case.

As if Parker had nothing better to do than subtly shifting people around so that the mark wouldn’t miss them in a crowd.

This was personal for Alec because this was personal for the whole town. Wronged people should be given tools to get even, otherwise they’ll be, again and again, wronged.

“Nate should know this”, Parker announced, with perhaps a little more passion than she intended. She sat up and the light on the stage blinded her for a second. Hardison and Eliot were balancing on the seats, shoulder against shoulder. “ _We_ should tell him.”

Nate turned up, eventually, hat screwed to the head, with a very colourful Sophie on his footsteps.

Hardison stood up, still on the back of the seat. Parker found him incredibly awe-inspiring in that moment.

“Hardison, you have something to say?” Nate sounded cautious.

Hardison searched for Sophie’s eyes behind Nate. She had caught on what was happening and simply titled her head, reassuring.

“I think we can go bigger”, Hardison detached each word from each other.

Nate’s eyebrows flew up, not exactly in surprise. He looked sideways at Sophie who was smirking at Hardison.

“Okay. Generally, when I say that, Sophie pummels me to the ground and she encourages you. Unbelievable.”

Parker could swear she heard Sophie growl at him in answer.

“Bigger?”

Hardison walked from seat to seat until he reached the orchestra pit and sprung into the light.

“I want to turn this con on its head. I think we can be more ambitious. Do you know how good my kids are?”

Eliot had been more respectful of the venerable venue and was limping his way out the aisle.

“Not your kids, Hardi-“

Hardison held a hand to Eliot, commanding attention.

“No matter how hard you’ll try to sell those guys as losers, it’ll fail because they are so freaking good at what they do. So I’m saying this now: we go for a Linzer Torte.”

That was anticlimactic.

 “I have no idea how to do this”, Parker began, leaping from the last seat and sprinting to the stage before Eliot made it.

“It’s easy, but long”, Eliot stated. They were now standing in a semi circle at the front of the stage, surrounding Nate. “And you need lots of flour but…”

“The con, not the cake”, Hardison cried.

“What the hell do you think I was talking about? The flour is paramount to the con!”

Nate lifted a hand to put an end to the argument.

“Or any other sort of particle-light substance”, he concluded, gravely. “We know. So we make them famous to give them the power? That’s what you want?”

Hardison shrugged and sneaked a side-glance at Eliot, who was beaming, fists planted on his hips as if they had just managed to launch a rocket. Eliot elbowed Hardison who mirrored Eliot’s posture.

“You bet we make them famous. We bring people here. We do what they originally wanted to do with Yasin. Give them visibility. Corner the Haddocks. Humiliate them.”

Nate’s face was impressed. Even his hat seemed to want to salute Hardison. As with Hardison before, Nate was thinking, hard. He brought a finger to his lips and kept the position for what seemed like an eternity.

“Okay, let’s go still a stage hit.”

Hardison jumped in the air, fist raised in victory, and launched into a polka with a non-cooperating Eliot. They exited the stage without crashing into any curtain, Eliot was probably thankful for that.

“You heard that? My con! Come on, y’all, we have much to do”, Hardison shouted from the wings.

Parker followed behind, not before addressing a radiant smile to Sophie and Nate.

“Sophie”, Parker heard Nate whispered to Sophie as she was leaving. “Just go by the theatre and make sure they are indeed as good as he says they are. I don’t want a 20s mafia retelling of Star Wars to save this town.”

“Darling, I assure you it could be a newfangled mess with chickens as leads and goats as Greek chorus, Hardison would still bring down the house with that show.”

 

***

 

The toughest part in navigating Hardison’s plan was the somersaults needed not to disrupt what Nate had already set in motion; they still had to terrorize the Haddock brothers into relative ceasefire regarding the theatre company, to ensure Sophie appeared to be setting up the theatre for failure and on top of that to reinstate Eliot as member of the living.

Sophie was essentially playing Eliot’s role. She was the repellent. A brand that also acted as glue, since on her ability to maintain a façade depended Hardison’s safety. At no moment should the brothers and their goons be allowed to act on their own or to approach the troupe. Eliot resolved to shadow the Haddocks every time they would step in town, a rare occurrence, and Nate had assumed part of Hardison’s workload, ensuring the digital promotion and  anticipatory buzz around the soon to be opened show.

“Let him click on things and move text around. It’ll give him a sense of purpose”, Sophie had bitten.

One of the unintended advantages of their new course of action was her spending more time with Hardison at the theatre. From time to time, she would stage, with the troupe’s agreement, scenes intended to throw the Haddocks brothers off their trails. They know believed Sophie had fully integrated the theatre company and would get them to bomb on their opening night, leaving the mayor no choice but to dissolve the association and cede the theatre ground to the Haddock brothers.

They had been working hand in hand for two days when Hardison came at her backstage, fiddling with notes, with a sheepish pout on the face.

 “You need something from me”, she stated, not looking up as she was putting away costumes.

Hardison hissed and scratched his left eyebrow.

“Yeah, do you remember when I said my kids were so good they will need nothing more than a push?”

Sophie got up and folded her arms on her chest, waiting for the blow. Of course, it couldn’t remain all toying around with cartoonish villains and stage backdrops forever.

“I might have meant more of an engine”, he stammered, worrying the corner of this note. A locomotive to be precise.”

“I’m not going to steal a locomotive, Hardison”, she scolded him.

“No, you’re going to steal the entire railway network.”

Sophie could not utter a word, so great was her astonishment. Talk about upping the ante. Hardison proceeded to explain in great details that considering the state of the carriageway in this region it was unwise of them to rely on people driving here and that the train would be the better solution, but for that he needed Sophie to introduce a county-wide change of train timetables.

“To make it more attractive to customers, you see. It’s a marketing thing. I don’t _really_ require of you to steal anything. Just-”

“A lot of time. You realize these schedules are created a year in advance.”

“I don’t ask for more trains. I just need you to shift around the ones circulating. Please?”

He leaned in, making puppy eyes at her to make light of the situation, but Parker had told her how important this con was to him. She couldn’t let him down.

And to be fair, he had witnessed her deceiving a whole room into seeing her as Elvis Presley. 

It didn’t require much manipulation though. She took the place of a guy from the railway maintenance team working on the line, sparked a little revolution that nearly cost the head of the line her head and convinced her colleagues to demand more suitable hours. Which meant the train schedules had to be shifted around. 

“Remind me never to approach you ever again, Sophie”, Hardison said when he welcomed her back to her room at the hotel. “You’re scary.”

She removed her uniform with a smirk, eyeing Parker cross-legged on the bed.

 _I’m still not sure what she does exactly,_ Nate, stuck with Eliot at the theatre, sounded even more challenged than usual.

“Has your mama ever introduced you to the concept of politeness?” Hardison shouted in feigned outrage. “Incredible.”

 _He has no idea what her abilities are,_ Eliot chuckled in her ears.

 

***

 

Their monitoring of the Haddocks had a rhyme to it: they were deathly afraid of the story becoming about them.

On the eve of the premiere, in one of Sophie’s hard-won trains, the gorilla that had cried between the yoga mattress and the ping-pong table and who was just returning from a trip to see his aunt started chatting. Not even to one of the journalists Nate had invited. To a photographer, who sensed very soon that the condescension with which the goon was treating what had been hyped as a little marvel, was cause for alarm.

Sophie, who had been put on the train with Eliot to get a feel of the crowd, was the first to notice the small man and his camera snooping around and asking questions to the few local commuters he could find. By the time Eliot was made aware of the situation, the photographer was onto a story and Sophie had lost him.

Eliot took Sophie by the hand and performed a series of displacements, from wagon to wagon, in search of the missing photographer. Jumping inside a moving vehicle was much easier than what most people expected. It was all about finding the right reference.

Sophie was a tad fussy when it came to displacement in space, but she was also, in this very situation, livid that one conversation between travelling neighbors could jeopardize Hardison’s grand plan. Of course, they couldn’t be sure any other Parisian wouldn’t chat with journalists, but this photographer was the only one who had made the trip. Which meant every other news agencies would use his pictures. Hardison had a system to his delusion of fame and he made sure there were safety nets in place. But the moment fame extended to them, the safety nets would snap and the town would get nothing of their revenge or their money.

As in San Lorenzo, the press could not know about them.  

Eliot felt like fidgeting, which wasn’t good. Sophie’s stillness would have been a more worrying indicator if she hadn’t been so busy hissing at Nate in the coms whenever they landed.

 _Eliot, he cannot know about us._ Hardison in his panic was speaking at the same speed as the train. _He’ll make the story about the con and that’ll just about kill the momentum I had counted on._

Eliot waited to have completed his last jump to answer Hardison:

“Alright! Sophie’ll just extract the info manually when we find him, that’s no problem.”

He sensed Sophie tense against him.

“Huh.”

“Huh, what?” Eliot gnarled. “I risk my neck to keep that guy here safe and oblivious of what we’re doing. Don’t tell me you can’t do that… thing.”

Sophie stepped away from him, embarrassed.

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“Well, I’m asking, _please_ , because we’re on our last leg and we need your help, so get over it.”

“I don’t think you understand how this works.”

“I don’t. You never care to explain.”

“I cannot do it anymore. There was an incident, some years ago. I made a mistake and it went terribly wrong. I don’t trust myself with this trick anymore. Which means, the way the process works, I cannot do it safely, for me or him.”

Eliot looked at her with a mixture of concern and annoyance. He trusted the assessment every member of his team could make of their own abilities, their limits and strengths. Despite Sophie’s little games surrounding her tricks, she was a professional. This wasn’t about feeling comfortable.

He scratched the patch of skin behind his ear.

“It’s okay. When could you do it?”

Sophie’s eyes comically bulged out.

“Excuse me?”

Eliot took a step closer to her and secured her right hand in his.

“You said there was a time when you were perfectly able to do it. Can you tell me exactly when and where in your life you could have done this precise extraction without risking his life or yours?”

Realization dawned on Sophie’s face. 

“Oh. I see. Uh, there was a rather long period of time in the 90s when I was on a roll.” She was resting her index on her lower lip, lost in concentration. She looked up, grimacing. “You need an exact location and time, right?”

Eliot gawked at her, eyebrows raised. And she was the one with the mind reading act.

“What about the Grand Café in Belgrade, 1990?” Sophie proposed,

“Do the math. What would I have been doing in Belgrade as a teen?” Eliot deadpanned and Sophie shot him a death glare. “I was I’m pretty familiar with Hong Kong in the late 90s”

Sophie grimaced.

“I’m not and I’d rather you do not meet me around that time. France?”

“I’ll confuse the places. You once said you had a long con in Jo-Burg?”

“Same as before. Picking me from that time and place would be tricky. What about the Alhambra?”

“Do you know Dani’s?”

A smile bloomed on Sophie’s face and Eliot could swear this was the most natural and reassuring event since Yasin had invited them for tea last week.

“1995, October the 8th, around 10 p.m., first floor, room 08?”

Eliot repeated her words to himself, committing them to memory and making the necessary calculations.

“Could do. What am I to expect?”

“Bed on the left wall instead of the right. An antique sword against the centre wall. A man unconscious on the balcony. Bow and arrow of competition leaning against the door frame to the bathroom. Lots of feathers, in bags, outside bags, on the bed, everywhere, really. Tara wearing very little.”

“Feathers? I won’t ask.”

Sophie did not seem concerned with the possibility of Eliot judging her past life though.

“Tara is going to kill me”, she sighed.

Eliot messed with his hair to get it in an unusual shape, hoping it would throw past Sophie off. Come to think of it, this temporal crossing would explain the flash of recognition on Sophie’s face the first time they crossed path in Syria in 2001.

He groaned, imagining how unkempt he must have looked with his hair tousled like that, but he had no time to fix it.

“You sure you aren’t the one who will kill me?”

“Trust me, being brought to the future by a disheveled thief isn’t the weirdest thing that happened to me that year. Not even that evening. Now, to present me…”

“I still need insurance Sophie. Getting killed by Tara isn’t an option.”

Sophie leaned against him and whispered in his ear, keeping her words away from her com and Eliot’s. When she leaned back, Eliot couldn’t help his bemused expression.

“I’m gonna roll with that and hope you’re not trying to become President of the USA.”


	4. Act III

As days went, Sophie had known stranger ones. More dangerous too. But seeing a younger version of herself perform a proper extraction on a confused independent photograph who used a technology that hadn’t been invented in her time was definitely the weirdest one.

She could feel both the memories of her hop ahead in time and of the man sitting before her entangling with her own, at the juncture of a late Iberian afternoon in a distant past. It was disturbing and she vowed never to agree to such a trick again. For all she knew, this was the very reason she would develop such a crippling inability to extract in the early 2000s.

But watching herself perform the extraction in itself was fascinating and part of her couldn’t help taking mental notes of the work her younger self was doing on the photographer. Eliot, beside her, seemed transfixed. He had been the one to more accurately guess what she could do exactly; it didn’t mean he was comfortable with the tricks she used.

Then, her younger self was essentially, at that very instant, sucking and leafing through the essence of a poor sod in order to manipulate and swap his memories.

 _Fair enough_ , she thought, rubbing her temples in exhaustion.

When the younger Sophie was finished with the guy she let go off his arms with a nonchalance that left Sophie on edge. She surely had changed with those days. These days, she mostly used her tricks to modify others’ perception of her appearance and surroundings. She believed in minimal effort and as it turned out, talking people out of the information she needed was oftentimes less demanding than peering into their soul for a key number.

Eliot was chatting up to the photographer, trying to get him back to his car, but Sophie had done such a good job on him that he was insisting on a portrait of Eliot since “if this ride gets any more boring, we’ll disembark at Folkestone on arrival.”

Both Sophies broke into laughter and Eliot shook his head as he led the photographer out of the baggage car.

In Eliot’s absence, the Sophies danced around each other, without a word. The risks of exchanging damaging foresights were too high. Even the younger Sophie, with her carelessness and greediness, understood what was at stake. Trickster’s honour. Older Sophie was thankful the extraction had happened in an old train that might very well date back to the 1990s, otherwise she would have left younger Sophie with so many questions. But, then, she remembered what that year has been like and how a trip to her personal future hadn’t even been a milestone.

On the other Sophie’s part, the examination was coloured with admiration, which Sophie found sweet. She didn’t recall being so generous with herself at the time; it seemed Sophie wasn’t burning the candle at both ends the way she remembered.

“Wow”, younger Sophie simply said, taking in Sophie.

“I know”, older Sophie echoed her tone and they exchange a small smile.

“Please don’t flirt with yourself”, Eliot whispered in her ear having parted with the photographer. “Rule number one of time skipping. Young lady?”

He offered an arm to younger Sophie who took it languidly.

Sophie bit her lower lid.

“Give Tara a kiss for me.”

“Back at you?” younger Sophie tried, a cocky eyebrow raised.

“Sure will”, Sophie reassuringly breathed. The couple disappeared before her eyes without a disturbance to the air around.

 

***

 

The second and quite essential part of Hardison’s plan was getting people to the show, influencers, entertainers naturally, but also wagon loads of theatre goers from within the state. People who would, in Sophie’s words, spread the gospel as soon as they stepped out of the theatre.

Eliot trusted Hardison’s judgment regarding the quality of the play, but with the amount of buzz they had created about that “tiny town where the future of live entertainment is built”, the success of Hardison’s troupe didn’t really matter. People would talk about everything that happened tonight and people will come to future shows out of curiosity.

The troupe was scheduled to perform three nights only, mostly because they lacked the money to put on more shows, but the first two nights were already packed. Hardison’s idea to create a site for the troupe and set up the online ticket store had paid off. And potential audience members were certainly waiting for the first reviews to make the trip to Paris.

Eliot checked his watch one last time , Parker pacing at his side at the train station. The passengers had already started to exit the train and Hardison seemed to have trouble locating his special guests in the sizeable crowd of the early afternoon. He let out a cry of joy and waved at someone:  

“Nana!”

Parker and Eliot immediately froze on their feet.

“That’s his secret weapon?” Parker squeaked, livid.

A tall black woman in her seventies with snow-white hair and an elegant but practical marine dress parted the crowd with her arms held open. Hardison ran to her and fondly embraced her.

Parker and Eliot approached them, cautiously.

“Hey, Ms. Hardison – Ma’am – Hardison’s Nana.”

This was not going well for Eliot, yet Nana took one look at him and shot him the brightest smile.

“He looks exactly like you described him”, she chuckled, pulling at Hardison’s sleeve. “Maybe a little less articulate. But he does have beautiful knuckles.”

She extended a hand in his direction which he graciously took, only to be pulled in a sudden hug. “Call me Ma’am again and I’ll insist you refer to me as Madam President”, she said as she was stepping away, already setting her eyes on the poor thief who looked like she was about to make a run for it. “It’s Nana. And you are probably Parker? Alec told me so much about you and I could not wait to meet you, dear.”

Nana opened her arms, offering without asking, and Parker gladly stepped in. She casually rest her head on Nana’s shoulder and Nana laughed in return.

“I would have accepted this invitation only to meet these two”, she informed Hardison. “Don’t hide them to me for as long as you did.”

“Sorry? Did you bring-“

A thunderous gargle of joy exploded somewhere inside the wagon and a flurry of small old men and women scurried in their direction, only stopping when they had properly buried Hardison.

Parker called his name, filled with fear, and Nana took her hand.

“They’re with me, dear.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay”, Hardison’s voice could be heard saying from somewhere under the large hats and scarves. “Hi, Geraldine. I’m happy to see you too. Hey, Catalina, my only love. Ladies, gentlemen, I am delighted to see you all, but we have a house to bring down, am I right?”

The group of fifteen or so laughed brightly in answer as Hardison extracted himself from the small herd and guided them out of the station.

His Nana had stayed behind, her gaze going calmly from Eliot to Parker.

“Give me your arms, you two. We have much to discuss.”

Every seat was taken at the Cherry Café, but Hardison had made sure the owner had put aside seats and tables outside the shop.

Eliot chuckled as he recognized among the mismatched furniture Yasin’s orange garden chairs.

Nana’s friends proved rather keen on exploring the little town on their own, while Eliot ordered for their little group whatever was left to consume at the shop.

“Do you make sure he eats and exercises properly?” Nana inquired straight away, laughter in the eyes. “It’s really all I care about.”

“You don’t care about the steal-“Parker enthusiastically asked, before Eliot kicked her under the table.

“Still life”, he corrected her and she mouthed a sorry. “I find his still life paintings take an dangerous amount of space that not everyone is ready to deal with, right?”

Hardison’s smile had turned into an awkward grin.

“You do still life now?” Nana seemed concerned. “That’s a bit boring, not to mention expensive. But then, you moved to Portland to open a pub and then you are in the middle of the desert to lead a theatre troupe.”

“I did tell you about the pub, Nana… And this is only temporary. I was giving a hand to a friend.”

 

***

 

Parker had no idea what was happening on stage. It was the most beautiful show she had ever seen and she had sneaked in many galas to steal diamonds from the necks of rich people. She never stayed long enough to properly assess the artistry of the people gesticulating far away in the light. She always had a feeling of being left out, as if the display was just a demonstration underlining just how much she didn’t belong there.

But Hardison’s kids were different.

She wished she could have said that Hardison had left a mark on their play, but nowhere in the humour, fantasy and beauty could she find him. It was entirely their work and Parker took the measure of Hardison’s work: the help provided without imprinting his own vision on them, the sets and costumes all put together by members of the community under Hardison’s guidance, the progressive distance he had taken from practice, directing, staging and rewriting. In Sophie’s hands, this would have become Sophie’s show; in Hardison’s, it became properly the theatre troupe’s. When the five of them would leave the city, the troupe would be more than capable to put on a show season after season, without their help.

The four of them were leaning against the wall at the very back of the theatre, with the ushers, really Karina and Pauline from the library, and savouring the moment. There was no doubt that whatever was happening on stage would shake the face of entertainment for some time, and the town. The “ohs” and “ahs” of the audience were too sincere to result in a one-night stand.

When the curtain came done for the intermission, the excited babbling of the crowd left the room for the foyer, leaving the five of them slightly in a daze, staring at red velvets and bright lights.

“Make it snappy”, Sophie sing-sang, breaking the silence at last. “We come on in act III, everyone.”

Hardison snorted, miffed.

“I’m the director, _me_. I say that.”

“Well, direct”, Parker barked as she walked past him, talking Eliot by the elbow to lead him out.    

Hardison disappeared to check on the sound. They took their places in the foyer and Eliot chatted for a while with Zeke who was selling drinks and cakes.

The intermission had just finished and people were going back to their seats when a hand pulled Nate back  into the hall. It was the younger of the Haddock brothers, with a vein about to pop on the side of his forehead.

“Your boss said this”, he enunciated, squirming as she showed the room. “Was going to be taken care off. What is going on?”

“A show, I should say”, Sophie remarked, shrugging. Her voice was even and menacing.

The second brother was standing a few meters away, flanked by his assistants. If his nervous glances directed at the younger Haddock were anything to go by, he wasn’t trusting his brother to handle the situation.

“This was supposed to be the nail in their coffin”, he was spitting in Sophie and Nate’s face. “Why are they performing in front of the bloody New York Times’ critic now?”

From behind the doors, the first notes of the soundtrack began ringing, which seemed to have a terrible effect on the second Haddock brother’s nerves. He took one step closer to the group.

Sophie looked at him sideways, as if barely interested.

“Is it? I didn’t recognize her”, Nate observed. “I spend too much time beating people in back alleys.”

“What is going on?” The older Haddock asked between gritted teeth.

“You really didn’t think we would blow up a room full of people”, Sophie whispered, tutting in their face.

The younger Haddock became white with rage, while the older one turned a bright shade of red.

From their spot behind the yucca, Eliot and Parker nearly high-five each other.

“There are cameras! This is supposed to ruin them”, the younger Haddock was shouting in hushed tones. ”You know what? We’re going to take care of this myself.”

He grabbed Nate aside and threw him out of the way, as much as the mastermind’s height would allow it, and snapped his fingers together to call his assistants.

The older Haddock shot a mean look to Nate before following his brother backstage.

“Parker, Eliot”, Sophie breathed. “They’re all yours.”

 _Timer set,_ came Hardison’s voice at the lighting desk. _Go._

“Have fun”, Nate grinned, giving a pat on the hitter’s back as they left the foyer.

The hitter and thief had to work quickly, but they had the advantage of knowing the theatre like the back of their hands.

Eliot started isolating the assistants from the Haddock brothers, appearing and disappearing on the corner of their eyes in the backstage maze. Parker could have given him a hand, but she knew just how much he enjoyed taking goons by surprise, vanishing just before the hit landed to kick them from behind.

As expected, they hadn’t counted on him being still standing after his fall from their last race on the lighting rack and shrieked with horror when he struck them in the face.

Parker trapped the Haddock brothers using everything she had stored and that wasn’t required on stage. The best part of the Linzer torte was the decoration and Hardison had provided her with a whole set of props, however artisanal and dusty, to throw across the bosses way.

Nothing was as satisfying to Parker as waltzing through walls and curtains to grab, push and jostle in every direction the two men. Ragged costumes would claw at them, prop trunks would tackle them and they would run in circle, unable to find the exit in the maze created by Parker.

Eliot, naturally, was the one to pop up behind them and blow up the bag of flour on their head, covering them from head to toe.

The brothers, brought to a state of terror, tried to fight the tentacles of the set, stumbled backward into what they think was a  cardboard castle, only to break the glass door to the main street. When they looked up, the town’s marshal was gaping at them.

“Mr. and Mr. Haddock?”   

 

***

 

The Haddocks took a preposterous amount of time to get to the explanation, so inarticulate was their anger. Twice, they tried to barge in back into the theatre, only to be stopped by the marshal who had since called for back-up.

The play was still going strong inside and judging by the atmosphere at the intermission, many curtain calls would prolong the evening. Nate, standing cross-armed before the theatre, was readily joined by Parker and Eliot who could not resist admiring their handiwork.

“It’s flour, you idiot”, the older Haddock cried when one of the marshal’s colleagues tried to take a sample.

“Sir, your flour is gunpowder.”

He did not look amused.

“What?” the younger Haddock spat.

“The joys of matter manipulation”, Parker whispered in Nate’s ear, with the grin of a Cheshire’s Cat. “Everything is everything. Until I say it’s not anymore.”

“Mr. Haddock, five minutes ago someone called in for drunkenly disorder on the main street”, the Marshall was flipping through his notebook, uncomfortable. He had not expected to spend his evening debating with irate wealthy men covered in flour.

“We’re not drunk”, the older Haddock chimed in. “We’re pursued.”

“By the phantom of the opera?” The Marshal wanted to go home. “What were you doing backstage with gunpowder?”

At this very moment, an older woman dressed in green stepped outside the theatre, holding her cellphone in hand in search of a signal. Sophie walked out behind her and trotted to the little group. Upon seeing the Haddocks, the lady in green did a double take.

The brothers squeaked together as she stalked towards them:

“Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

“I thought there was a dress code for this event. Why are you covered in-“

“Gunpowder, M’am”, one of the officers filled in.

The younger Haddock was so red in the face that even the white powder looked baby pink.

“Did the police bring you as their escort?” Mrs. Fitzpatrick deadpanned, but her expression betrayed nothing but fury.

“It’s a misunderstanding.” The older Haddock haphazardly pointed at the group of thieves at the theatre entrance. “ _They_ were trying to disrupt the show and I saw them and I followed them because they had been shadowing me for weeks now.”

“And you didn’t report them? Good. Because they are EPA agents.”

The older Haddock had the decency to become white as a sheet.

“No, they’re not”, the younger Haddock countered. He pointed at Sophie, who did not bat an eye. “ _She_ stole the family jewels from our safe.”

Mrs. Fitzpatrick considered Sophie with a hint of admiration before going back to the Haddocks.

“If ‘family jewels’ is a metaphor for private studies of the ammoniac concentration in the public water supply due to illegal dumping, then, yes, she acquired your concealed family jewels and presented them to me two weeks ago. Again, for fear of repeating myself, what is going on exactly? There are journalists inside the venue and I do not wish to explain this to my shareholders.”

 

***

 

Hardison took in the view before him. On one side of the small theatre, people were flocking near the stage-door to take a peek. On the other side, the marshal was discreetly trying to shove into his car the Haddock brothers, under the concerned expression of Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

The play had been more than a success. It had been an explosion of joy and novelty and everyone inside the theatre had been aware of it. Sophie was consulting various social media to assuage the journalist’s response and each new tweet or post brought new expletives. The venue, particularly had enchanted the crowds; the train journey, the quiet town, the old theatre, the makeshift set and multi-talented troupe.

The mayor of Paris was gesticulating in front of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, in hushed tones explaining how vital it was for the city to clean the ground and the water supply as soon as possible.   

“You still did your thing”, Hardison scolded Nate.

The EPA agents certainly brought the Nate touch, but were utterly unnecessary to his plan.

Nate shrugged, half-grinning.

“It was a minor thing and even then, my thing was a distraction for your thing. I decided a little extra humiliation could help with our cause.”

“I’m team Nate on this”, Parker commented. “You’re a care bear. You needed the extra evilness.”

Eliot let out a noise that was half snort, half approval.

“I’ll take that as a compliment”, Nate frowned. ”You realize your plan is solely based on Mrs. Fitzpatrick fear of looking bad in front of her rich friends who came to this forgotten town. She wouldn’t look twice at this town and its inhabitants, if it they remained nobodies.”

“Yeah, but they aren’t nobodies. And this is their game now.”

Sophie hummed, cheeks rosy with euphoria. The air was warm with excitement and possibilities.

“It won’t be long before the balance of power shifts dramatically around here. A cultural elite, thirsty for the fresh and new. A troupe and a community read to turn their fate on its head.”

“My kids are going to be the new bosses around town”, Hardison dramatically sobbed.

Eliot rolled his eyes and put his arm across Hardison’s shoulder.

“Some of your ‘kids’ are old enough to play quidditch with your Nana.”

Hardison was blissfully ignoring Eliot, eyes up to the sky.

“My kids, out there, ready to run the world.”

“He’s right”, Nate was beaming. “His kids are going to be the bosses’ bosses. If they want to.”

From behind them came a series of familiar calls and Nana stepped in their circle between Sophie and  Parker, linking arms with both.

“So, Sophie, that thing you said earlier about picking up billionaires…”


	5. Epilogue

“Geraldine, this is not a competition. The goal is to work your body by swimming. Otherwise we would just have hired a flying instructor.”

Nana was doing her best not to look up at the tiny woman floating above the water level as she was slowly progressing in large strokes. The municipal pool was more than half empty at this early hour, with only a few pensioners splashing around to disturb the water. This was probably why no employers had called out for Geraldine and politely asked her to kindly swim in the water.

That or they were too busy having a laugh on their behalf because Nana couldn’t think of an image more ridiculous than two elderly women arguing, one feigning to swim mid-air, the other in the water trying to pull her down by the foot every other stroke.

“I told you I didn’t feel like swimming this morning.”

Nana rolled her eyes, contorting her mouth in a way that she hoped would be enough of a threat for Geraldine to come down.

“I know I say this every morning. But this time, it’s true. I’m still doing the movement.”

Geraldine readjusted the swimming cap on her head not even bothering to pretend no movement whatsoever was required to keep her afloat in the air. Nana wished she would have followed Lin’s suggestion to go in the afternoon instead so that four of them could have made the date. Geraldine was always putting on a show.

“You still owe me for that play last month”, Geraldine continued, unperturbed by Nana’s disapproval sniffing.

“I thought you enjoyed it?”

“I did. But afterwards you pushed us all in the train and we had no time to talk to Alec and his friends.”

“He was busy. Do you imagine the time and energy needed to help putting together a show like that. I’ve heard they’ve gotten so big since. Can you believe what a change it must be for the city?”

On the edge of her vision, she saw someone wave at them and before she could identify them, a gentle splashing sound indicated her that Geraldine had deigned to enter the waters again, presumably to gossip.

“You must feel proud of him. And his young man is a very beautiful man. And his young woman as well.”

Nana hummed in approval.

“But I really don’t like that other man’s hair.”   


End file.
